Motorola DROID 4 renders don’t make the wait any easier

By all accounts, lots and lots of original Motorola DROID owners have upgraded to Verizon’s Galaxy Nexus now that many of them are past their two-year upgrade point. But there’s still something to be said for physical keyboards, and those waiting for a high-end QWERTY phone have been largely ignored on Verizon for the last several months. The DROID 4 has been eagerly awaited by those wishing for some LTE goodness mixed with RAZR styling, but the latest rumored date (yesterday) didn’t pan out. In the meantime, have a gander at these renders dug up by Droid Life, covering every digital millimeter of the upcoming phone.

The DROID 4 will be just the second Verizon LTE device with a full keyboard, and borrow largely from the DROID RAZR and DROID XYBOARD. The tapered look around the 4-inch screen, as does the 960 x 540 resolution, but unfortunately the screen itself is a mere LCD. Inside you’ll get 16GB of storage for Android Gingerbread to play with, though unfortunately it’ll do so with a locked bootloader. Unlike the slinky RAZR, the DROID 4 will retain its removable battery. At this point a release before January seems unlikely, and Verizon or Motorola may choose to reveal the phone at CES for a February debut.

The phone showed up on an internal page of Verizon’s DROID DOES marketing page, where every DROID phone has been featured since the original. That’s a pretty good indication that it will see a full marketing rollout eventually, with another Twitter scavenger hunt likely as not. Unfortunately it appears that the DROID 4 won’t follow in the footsteps of the DROID 3 and DROID 2 Global, and will forgo a multi-function radio compatible with international networks. That honor seems to be reserved for the upcoming HTC Fireball and LG Spectrum.